If you gamble, you’re backing a loser

I don’t believe I know anyone who does not do at least one lottery entry each week, and I’m quite sure it’s only a tiny percentage of the population who are clever enough to avoid taking part in the games on offer. The old saying “You have to be in it to win it!” holds very strong sway almost everywhere you look and you only have to check the size of the first dividend prizes, five nights a week, to get some notion of how many must take part! It’s quite common for the first dividend in Powerball to reach forty million dollars before it’s won, and although that is the game which does tend to build up the largest ‘jackpots’ due to the nature of the game, even the other ways of losing sometimes have twenty or more millions of dollars to give away (all tax free too!).

But the odds of winning that wonderful, multi-million dollar prize is something like twelve million to one against, so I wouldn’t recommend anyone holding their breath while they wait for the big one to come in!

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I am in any way being critical of all the people who like a flutter on the lotto, after all I am a flutterer myself, but at least I only spend about twenty dollars a week on my addiction, whereas I know of one person in particular who spends more than two hundred dollars a week. Of course, he tends to ‘win’ virtually every week too, but what he forgets is that his ‘win’ of say, one hundred and fifty dollars, is still actually a loss of  fifty dollars, so at the end of the day he does no better than the rest of us – he just does it quicker!

Another quick way of getting rid of a lot of cash is of course, the ‘Pokies’. There was a time, long ago, when Victorians from the Melbourne area had to travel all the way up to the New South Wales border in order to have a go at one of these deadly machines, but now they are everywhere; in Victorian pubs and clubs all over the State. Admittedly, a lot of the establishments we now enjoy visiting wouldn’t exist any more were it not for the income derived from these money gobblers, one of the few points in their favour. But go in to any one of them during the day and you’ll find a high proportion of the customers are pensioners, the group that can least afford to be there, but are nonetheless trying to extend their miserly pension to something more viable.

What they fail to realise however, is that the machines are there for the benefit of the venue, not the benefit of the client! By law they have to return to customers eighty seven percent of the money paid into them, which actually sounds pretty good, if you say it fast. But just stop and think for a moment – that figure means that, on average, every player MUST lose thirteen percent, the bit that the club/pub keeps. So in the long run they are backing a loser, and the longer they play, the more firmly the law of averages works against them. It really is very sad.

Finally, there’s horse racing – another mug’s game. The damned horses never seem to run to the form they’re supposed to, and it’s always much easier to pick a loser than a winner! And the tipsters in all the papers are of very little help either. I don’t know if they get a regular salary or are paid according to results, but last year, just for the fun of it, I kept a complete record of all the tipsters in the Herald Sun for a whole season of Saturday races, at the tracks nearest to Melbourne, to see just how well they did do in helping punters.

Well, I had a bit of a shock! The very best tipster (no names, no pack drill) managed to accurately pick the winner in just thirty percent of his choices and the other five were much worse than that. The bookies of course can’t lose if they do their work properly – ‘bookies’ is short for ‘book-keepers’, which is basically a type of accountant, so they are skilled at balancing the book, while the average punter once again loses!

Oh, I know, someone has to win, so “why not let it be me”, or “I have a system”, or even “God told me who was going to win, so I knew it would be easy”. We suckers leave logic at home when it comes to gambling in the hope of changing a life-style, but I have to assure you – you are backing a loser, and I’m prepared to offer you 100/1 odds on that!

Are you guilty of the weekly lotto ticket or flutter on the pokies or horses?